Some stuff about parenthood and websites... and puppies!
By snide 918 Comments
Duders. Today is my last day at CBS Interactive, and as such this ends my reign of terror running Giant Bomb / Comic Vine. The reasoning is very simple and quite boring. I love Jeff, the team and the community here all very much, but a few months ago I decided that I'd take some time off once my kid rolled around. So actually, I guess I just lied to you. March 29th was actually my last day. The past three weeks I've secretly been rearranging my garage, doing some gardening and downloading Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen. After 13 years of weekends, nights and twitter replies it's been a pretty drastic change. Mostly I've just been hanging with Veronica and saying shit like "And this Veronica is Icewind Dale II, Daddy's favorite game".
I'll leave the sappy stuff out of here but put briefly, thank you for these amazing sites. You have no idea how much fun it is to be a tool-builder and then see people use your tools. More than that, it's been fun having the dialog about what to build and why things are built the way they are. That just doesn't exist anywhere else on the Internet, and I've enjoyed all the PMs, emails, twitter replies and skype call-ins over the years. I know I've helped inspire people into the profession and that's been pretty fucking rad for me because it means I know that others will help mold the Internet away from the shit-storm of crap that it sometimes seems to move toward.
So, why the long wait for the announcement? Basically because I knew CBSi was in talks to hire someone to take over a lot of the community management and product issues I maintained. That person needed to understand how and why the community works, not just be able to steward an engineering team. I was hoping they'd pick someone in particular, so I waited a bit so you guys knew this wasn't some random decision. We had a plan damnit!
Matt Rorie is now the Product Manager for Giant Bomb.
I just blew your mind. I know. You're in shock. But then you're like... but Dave, Rorie isn't a designer? I hate to break it to you Internet, but me being a designer/coder was more a product of us being a 2-person company back in 2006, that's never the way it works on sites of this size. Usually the guy who manages the web site has no more skills than being friendly and buying engineers drinks in exchange for code (Tip to Rorie: @ltsquigs likes Vodka gimlets). Also know that for all intents and purposes, Alexis has been the designer of these sites for the past two years. I mostly just built the CMS and moderation tools. It's been that way for awhile because Alexis is a much, much better designer than I am.
More importantly having Rorie join the team means that I know there's someone in charge that can do more than just file bug reports and make wire-frames. It's still a small site and it's better to have well-rounded people that can be on camera, chat up users at PAX and chip in with the occasional review. Selfishly I'm also pleased that Rorie knows how to fill the gap of totally obscure PC game coverage. If you sit and think about it, this totally makes sense.
As for me. While I officially don't work here anymore I've decided to take a page from Gary Whitta's playbook and show up anyway. I'll still be popping in on podcasts, quick looks and the like as usual. I just won't be getting paid for it. All my friends work here, so it's kind of impossible to really leave.
If for some reason you need to contact me I'll still be on the boards and reading PMs, but you can also find me on twitter @enemykite or by email at dave.snider@gmail.com. I have no idea what I'm going to end up doing for a job down the line, but for right now I'm just digging making goofy faces at my kid.
Thanks for everything duders.
PS: You should totally freak out the people at CBS and buy a subscription. They'll think Rorie is some kind of business genius, and as I've mentioned before, it's the best way to help the site moving forward. Then maybe we can get him on Survivor or something.
One last note
Jeff, this one's for you buddy. I never thought I'd get to build a video game website again. Thanks for making that happen.
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